


It started small

by masterroadtripper



Series: Telling The Truth [6]
Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Abuse, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Underage Smoking, Verbal Abuse, smoking weed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:01:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22945951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterroadtripper/pseuds/masterroadtripper
Summary: Connor wasn't perfect.  He didn't take his meds and he smoked pot.  He yelled.  He screamed.  He punched and he hit.  He was not perfect.In their third year of university, Connor shares a story from his past that he is convinced will make Evan hate him.  He's getting better.  They both are.  But that doesn't mean that night in the summer before his senior year didn't haunt Connor to this day."Just because Connor isn't here trying to punch through my door, screaming at the top of his lungs that he's going to kill me for no reason, that doesn't mean that all of the sudden we're the fucking Brady Bunch."
Relationships: Alana Beck/Zoe Murphy, Evan Hansen/Connor Murphy
Series: Telling The Truth [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1595260
Kudos: 41





	1. Chapter 1

“Can I tell you something Evan?” Connor asked that night. They had just gotten back from dinner with Zoe and Alana, but Connor had seemed out of sorts all night. Evan knew that there was something deeper concerning him other than simply seeing his sister and his sister’s girlfriend again for the first time in three years, but Evan couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He knew better than to ask or pry until he knew for certain that Connor was ready to share. It seemed he was ready to share sooner than later.

“Of course,” Evan replied, collapsing into the soft sheets of their queen-sized-bed, the biggest thing in their entire tiny apartment.

“That was the first time I’ve seen Zoe in three years,” Connor said, unbuttoning the shirt he’d borrowed from Evan for the night. Peeling it off of his frame, Connor threw it in the direction of the laundry hamper. Evan was fairly certain it didn’t go in, but he wasn’t about to nag Connor over that at this moment.

“Yeah,” Evan replied, hoping the tone of voice he chose was prompting enough for Connor to continue on his own.

“I said some horrible things to her, back in high school,” Connor said, his right hand starting to shake a little like it did every time he got himself worked up about something.

“That was in the past. You’re different now Connor. You’re working on making amends,” Evan argued.

“Nothing can fix what I said to her,” Connor said, sitting down on the bed next to Evan, “How could she possibly forgive or forget what I said to her?”


	2. Chapter 2

Connor had his head down on the kitchen table, ears ringing and forehead pounding. He’d skipped sixth-hour class and had smoked a joint in the parking lot. Now he was paying for his impatience. The high was wearing off and fast. Every little sound seemed to rip through his head and make his thoughts turn into red hot anger. Not trusting his human interaction capabilities at the moment, he’d retreated into his head and put his head down on the table.

_This is all your fault. You couldn’t wait until after supper to get high and now you’re going to have to spend it with these freaks that want absolutely nothing to do with you. You’re their little secret. Dirty little secret._

“You know mom doesn’t like it when you put your head on the table,” he heard Zoe taunt from across the table. Connor chose to ignore her. Hopefully, mom or Larry hadn’t heard her comment. No reason to turn this into a yelling match. That was the last place that he wanted to go to tonight. He just wanted to struggle down enough food to make them happy then go back to his room and block everything out until he got level again.

“Connor, can you please sit up,” he heard his mother ask from somewhere across the kitchen. Probably near the sink, draining some inedible bowl of vegetables. Connor didn’t move. He didn’t think he would be able to even if he tried. He was so tense from the force it took to not lash out that he thought he would probably start shaking soon.

_Why the fuck do you care crazy lady? It's not like there are any of Larry’s fancy guests around. This isn’t a fancy court date or anything. There is no reason for you to be picking on me right now. Go pick on Zoe. She didn’t put her shoes away when she walked into the house. She didn’t bring her backpack upstairs before dinner. Pick on someone your own size._

“Your mother asked you to get your head off the table, it's not your bed,” Larry said, kicking the leg of Connor’s chair as he passed. As if there was someone else with their head on the table at that moment. Connor squeezed his eyes shut and didn’t lift his head.

_Fuck you Larry. Fuck you for kicking my chair. Would probably kick me too if your precious wife wasn’t standing right there because that would shatter her happy family image. That her husband is abusive. Actually, maybe that would be better._

“She said **sit up** ,” Connor heard Larry’s voice say behind the sharp pain of a hand wrapping around its ponytail and tugging backwards. Head and torso suddenly moved, Connor heard himself yelp in surprise, tears leaping to his eyes.

_Don’t you dare cry Connor you sissy. Don’t let him know that he won this round, because he didn’t. He cheated. Has been cheating your whole life. How mom doesn’t see that, I don’t know. Maybe she is just pretending for her own sake. Ignoring everything so she can fulfil her own fantasy._

“ _ **Don’t touch me**_ ,” Connor snarled, bloodshot eyes snapping to look at Larry and fixing him with a glare. He hoped it conveyed all the frustration he felt at that moment.

_I dare you to touch me in front of her. Show your wife what you do behind closed doors. Show her that she made a horribly terrible decision to marry you. That you are the monster and not me. That you made me into the monster I am today._

“Dad barely touched you,” he heard Zoe say from her spot at the table, nose in a book, not looking up at either of them.

_Oh yeah, stellar. Take Larry’s side. Give him evidence. Give them both evidence. May as well lock me up in jail now then. Treat me as a criminal anyway, may as well just make it real._

“Connor, remember what we said about exaggerating the truth?” his mother scolded him from the kitchen.

_Ah yes, take the side of your husband and not your child. Classic move mom. Real predictable._

Then, Connor felt his blood boil over. Like the Hulk, Connor felt that last thread holding him together snap. A chain holding back the monster. It was like the blood pumping through his head doubled speed suddenly, his senses heightened out of the lasting fog of his joint. The boiling of a pot on the stove. The ticking of the clock in the corner. The flop of turning paper. It all sounded so loud all at once.

“Shut the fuck up,” Connor droned, dropping his head back onto the tabletop lifelessly, the force behind the motion knocking wood against bone and causing more shooting pain through his head. He chose to let it ground him. Follow the pain, not the numbness. He’d followed the numbness for much too long.

“Zoe, could you please go up to your room,” he heard Larry say softly. A chair scraped across the floor followed by footsteps in the direction of the stairs.

“Why can’t you just let us have one normal supper?” he heard Zoe ask.

Snapping his head up to glare at his sister, standing at the bottom of the stairs, he said a little louder than necessary, “he told you to get the fuck out.”

Watching a brief flash of fear across her features before she turned to take the stairs two at a time, Connor decided to add, “do as daddy says,” teasingly, followed by shouting, “ **Fuck you Zoe** ,” for good luck.

“Sit down Connor,” he heard Larry say from behind him.

“How about no?” Connor countered, starting to walk towards the stairs. This whole yelling match wouldn’t have happened if Zoe hadn’t opened her big mouth and added her two cents. This wasn’t over between them. Not yet. It was over when he said it was over.

“Get back in the kitchen now,” Larry said, barely raising his voice. Playing it up to make Connor the bad guy.

“Fuck you Larry,” Connor said, taking the stairs three at a time, his long legs easily covering the distance. At the top of the stairs he saw the open door to his bedroom, the navy-blue walls almost beaconing him in.

_Be the good guy Connor. C’mon. Go into your room, turn on some music, shut out the word and get level again. You don’t need to finish this with Zoe. It will solve nothing. Nothing will get accomplished other than making you both angry._

_Or you could go over there and give her a piece of your mind. She was the one that escalated this whole thing. It wasn’t a big deal until she spoke. Go over there. It's only three steps in the other direction. No big deal._

Turning towards Zoe’s closed door, Connor pounded on it with his fist as hard as humanly possible, the entire piece of wood and surrounding door frame rattling from the force.

“ **Connor get down here** ,” he barely heard Larry’s voice call from the bottom of the stairs.

“ **Zoe open this fucking door** ,” Connor shouted, drowning out Larry. Pounding on the door some more, he added, “ **Open this door right now Zoe**.”

In reality, he had no idea what he was going to say if Zoe opened the door or if he somehow managed to get in. He rarely had anything constructive to say to her nowadays anyways. Shock value. That's what it was. Connor wanted to scare her into not doing that again. If only she would just open the damn door.

“I **’m going to kill you Zoe** ,” Connor shouted, “ **I’m going to fucking kill you**.”

Then, he felt two arms wrap around his torso, effectively trapping his arms at his sides. Kicking, screaming and thrashing did nothing to dislodge Larry from his back. Leaning over proved fruitless as Larry’s arms were too low for Connor to bite him. Screaming until his voice was raw, Larry didn’t let go and instead turned the both of them in the direction of his room.

“ **Go calm down** ,” Larry shouted, letting go of Connor and pushing him away towards his open door at the same time.

Unable to form words through the fog clogging his senses, Connor just screamed at Larry.

“ **Connor, go calm the fuck down** ,” Larry shouted back, pointing in the direction of his door.

Giving one last frustrated scream, Connor did as he was told and turned, rushing into his room and slamming his door closed.

Clicking the lock shut, Connor turned and pressed his back against the door and let himself slide down it until he was sitting on the hardwood floor. That was when the first tear dribbled its way down his cheek. Plopping his head into his arms, resting on his awkwardly bent knees, Connor felt the tsunami of tears follow. Sobbing into his arms, Connor desperately tried not to think about what he had just done.

_I just threatened to kill someone. What does that say about me?_

Sniffling once he felt the faucet of tears slowly start to be turned off, Connor pulled himself to his feet and pulled his black sweater off of his too-thin frame. Throwing it onto the floor at the foot of his bed, he pulled the hair elastic out of his hair, dislodging the ponytail. He threw the elastic across the room. That was the last time he was tying up his hair just so it could be used against him. 

Opening the window just enough for him to crawl onto the roof, Connor stepped out, feet gripping well against the newly replaced shingles. Moving to the right side of the window so he couldn’t be seen from inside his room, he gingerly sat down at leaned back against the outer wall of the house.

Looking up at the stars, Connor wondered how everything had gone to shit so fast. Well, it hadn’t exactly been a fast process, but it had happened in about ten years. Relatively fast. Everything started going downhill after Larry quit his second job when he got that big lawyer-promotion-thing three days before Connor turned nine. He had worked at the law firm for years, but that never quite paid the bills, so he worked night shifts at a jail. Then, he got promoted, got paid more and quit the jail job. It was only a couple months before any little thing Connor did wrong started earning him a smack. Smacks turned into hits which became punches and kicks.

Around his thirteenth birthday, Connor felt like some magic switch had been flipped inside his head and suddenly he felt angry. It wasn’t all the time, sure, but it was often enough. He’d thrown his first rage-fit the morning of his thirteenth birthday and was brought to a doctor the next day.

It hadn’t happened right afterwards, but at some point he’d been put on mood stabilizers, turning him into what he assumed was the closest thing to a zombie as a living person could get. He stayed on his meds for three more years. Then he discovered weed. Which seemed to do the same thing - temporarily - and didn’t make him feel bad. Actually, it made him feel pretty fucking good. It was coming down off the high that brought everything that he felt inside out. It felt like every alarm bell on the planet was ringing inside his head while a monkey pressed every button that could be found. Any little thing set him off and caused rage-fits that only got worse and worse with every following instance.

Zoe started pulling away around that point. Connor knew what he had done and said. It was horrible. Worse than horrible. There really wasn’t a word for what he had just done. Or had done anytime before that. He didn’t blame her for pulling away but he wished he could go back in time.

He wished he had never decided to smoke that first joint. Because it became a habit, of sorts. Every other week, on Friday when Zoe stayed late after school for band practise, he’d drive down to 181st Street where there was a shop that didn’t ask questions about his age and stock up. Round trip, it added less than an hour onto his drive home from school and it was easy enough to blame his delay on traffic. Once he got home, he’d haul ass up to his bedroom and remove his loot from his backpack and stuff it into the little cubby-hole he’d carved into the back wall of his closet.

Connor knew that what he was doing was not a suitable alternative for taking his meds and going to therapy, but weed worked, the other two did not.

After throwing one too many fits over going to therapy, his father had finally decided that it was not worth paying for his son to attend and all future appointments were cancelled. At the time, Connor had been overjoyed. Maybe they would start treating him as if he was normal again. That never happened.

Swallowing hard, he remembered a line from a documentary he’d watched a couple of weeks ago when he was supposed to be doing homework. _The abused abuse._ Larry’s actions were filtering into him. They were becoming his actions and his decisions. Connor blamed no one else other than himself for his outburst over supper, but he blamed Larry on what he had said to Zoe.


	3. Chapter 3

“Thank you for telling me that Connor,” Evan said from where he was still sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce on the bed, his knees touching Connor’s as he watched the tears running down his boyfriend’s face.

“You hate me now, don’t you?” Connor asked, his voice weak and wavering.

“No,” Evan quickly answered before adding, “that was in the past.”

“I threatened to kill her,” Connor muttered, “I threatened to kill my own sister.”

“You were coming down off a high,” Evan replied, “and you were not taking your meds.”

“That doesn’t excuse it,” Connor countered.

“No it doesn’t,” Evan agreed, “but the past is the past and you are now learning how to be siblings again. Things are looking up.”

Connor said nothing but the look in his eyes told the entire story. Opening up his arms to his lanky boyfriend, Evan pulled Connor into his embrace, falling back onto the pillows and pulling Connor along for the ride. Landing on Evan’s chest, Connor buried his face into the crook of Evan’s neck.

“I love you,” Evan said, running his fingers through his boyfriend’s hair, gently pulling it out of its tangled bun.

“I love you too,” Connor murmured back.


End file.
